When at work or in school you typically have to deal with a lot of different people with different personalities.

What would you do if you had to work with someone who was very rude to you just because you were from a different part of the world?

That is what happened to the lab mate in this story, so she just worked hard and did as she was told.

Keep reading to see how the story plays out.

Don’t want to talk to your immigrant lab mate? Well then, I hope you didn’t need that experiment to work.

This happened to me when I was a graduate student in Germany.

Short background: I was born and raised in an Eastern European country.

Unfortunately, Western Europe often perceived easterners as lacking in health and morals. What we actually lacked was funding.

So, after I graduated top of my class from university, and I found myself unable to continue work on my research project, I applied for, and managed to get into, an international graduate program in Germany on a full scholarship.

Speaking your native tongue is always nice.

My German colleague, let’s call her Clara, who started at the same time was not able to get a scholarship initially and she was very unhappy about not being able to speak German with me.

The program we joined was all in English. I was fluent at that point in 3 languages (English being my second), but German wasn’t one of them.

She is really putting in a lot of effort.

I started learning it right away: took classes and organized a ‘tandem partner’ who could speak German to me once a week.

However, German is a difficult language and I couldn’t learn it overnight.

After 2 months, Clara started to get impatient and decided she was going to immerse me in the language.

This is just rude.

How did she do that?

By not speaking to me, and discussing with all our department colleagues only in German, without ever involving me in the conversations.

She got angry when that technique failed to improve my German, because she said “that’s how children learn languages, by hearing people speak around them.”

No, children learn a language when people INTERACT with them in that language, which she wasn’t doing.

This must have felt so isolating.

We got new colleagues, all German, and at her insistence they all almost exclusively spoke German.

Mind you, we were all part of the same English graduate program. They only addressed me in English when it was absolutely necessary.

All this time, I continued to take classes and my German comprehension progressed.

Clara sounds awful.

That was only part of Clara’s problems with me, which included:

1)     I only got into the graduate program because I was a foreigner.

2)     I must be sleeping around because I refused to tell her the number of previous partners I had (it was 0 actually).

3)     My bronchitis (which always activates after a bad cold) is really TB.

4)     I was only dating my now husband because I wanted a visa (I didn’t need one). And we shouldn’t have children together anyway because people from different cultures often do not have healthy babies.

5)     I was trying to spite her by not taking birth control, so that our menstrual cycles can sync (not kidding!).

This sounds like complex work.

Fast forward a couple of years.

I was in the lab, cleaning some equipment for an experiment. Behind me was an automated instrument (we called it a spotter) that was mixing together a liquid sample with a resin, then passing them through a needle and depositing them on a clean plate so that they could be read by a different machine.

The process took about 2 hours and was accompanied by the rhythmic noise as the needle moved up (sample mixing), sideways (to a new position), down (sample drop-off), up again and on and on.

Her understanding of the language is really getting better.

Clara was sitting 20 yards away, talking to another lab mate about their weekend.

At that point my German was much better and I could tell they were talking about food and relatives, nothing work related.

All of a sudden, the machine (spotter) stopped.

I jumped up and saw that the needle had gotten jammed between the up and down position. Never happened before and I knew we had a couple of minutes tops to save Clara’s sample.

It is good that she is still helpful, even if Clara is rude.

Mind you, this wasn’t the first time I’d saved one of her experiments.

A year earlier, she’d left town after performing surgery on 2 mice and she forgot them on the table in the surgery room; I got a desperate phone call from her (she was then 2 hours away) on Friday evening, begging me to save her mice which were by now cold and not breathing (I was able to bring one of them back to life).

Since Clara was now right there, I rushed to her and started saying: “Hey, your…”

No problem, just let her samples fail.

Clara raises her finger in front of my face, wags it and says “Not now, I’m busy,” then turns back to our colleague to talk about her mom’s cooking.

Something inside me snapped and I thought: “Oh yeah? Well Fine then!”

This is entirely Clara’s fault.

I quietly turned on my heels and got back to my experiment.

Fifteen minutes later, when Clara’s sample was beyond saving, she ends her conversation and sashes toward the exit with a big smile on her face.

Over my shoulder, I told her: “The spotter got jammed with your sample.”

Umm, she clearly tried!

The smile melted off her face and was replaced by panic, which was followed by a: “Why didn’t you tell me?”

So I replied with a big grin on my face: “I tried to. You were busy.”

This is totally not her problem.

Those samples took anywhere between a few days to a few weeks to replace. I’m not sure if she was able to repeat that experiment and I don’t care.

At the end of our program her harassment campaign against me (which had initially received support from our colleagues) backfired and I was offered a job and a raise while she was offered the door.

Sometimes karma really does win.

One year later, when I left for another position, she was still looking for a job.

Had I, the immigrant, been the one on unemployment for a full year, I would have never heard the end of it.

The sad thing is that Clara likely still doesn’t realize why she is not successful. People can tell when you are an awful person and they don’t want you around.

Let’s see what the people in the comments on Reddit have to say about it.

Learning the local language can be very helpful.

Oh, I’m sure this commenter is correct.

Culture doesn’t follow a boarder.

Apparently there are a lot of problems there.

Education doesn’t make you a good person.

Stereotypes won’t get you far.

If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.